Microsoft’s worst emails of all time

Microsoft’s worst emails of all time

The Seattle Post Intelligencer has collected and ranked the all-time worst (read: most incriminating) Microsoft emails of all time, and a dandy list it is, too. For heavy email users like me, it’s also a reminder that some things are better left unsaid…or at least unwritten.Perhaps my favorite of the bunch is Jim Allchin’s 2004 blast against Windows…and in favor of the Mac:

I am not sure how the company lost sight of what matters to our customers (both business and home) the most, but in my view we lost our way. I think our teams lost sight of what bug-free means, what resilience means, what full scenarios mean, what security means, what performance means, how important current applications are, and really understanding what the most important problems [our] customers face are. I see lots of random features and some great vision, but that doesn’t translate onto great products.

I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft.

But then there’s also the internal acknowledgements of the rising threat (and validity) of open-source software:

OSS [open-source software] systems are considered credible because the source code is available from potentially millions of places and individuals. The likelihood that Apache will cease to exist is orders of magnitudes lower than the likelihood that WordPerfect, for example, will disappear. The disappearance of Apache is not tied to the disappearance of binaries (which are affected by purchasing shifts, etc.) but rather to the disappearance of source code and the knowledge base….

The project must be cool enough that the intellectual reward adequately compensates for the time invested by developers. The Linux OS [operating system] excels in this respect….

[On attacking Linux.] Linux’s homebase is currently commodity network and server infrastructure. By folding extended functionality (e.g. Storage+ in file systems, DAV/POD for networking) into today’s commodity services, we raise the bar & change the rules of the game.

There’s much more. I encourage you to read them all. They illustrate that Microsoft has long been one of the most forward-thinking and self-aware companies in the business…but also one of the most threatened (and threatening).

Microsoft was first to spot the open-source threat. It’s unfortunate that it didn’t also recognize the open-source opportunity.

Matt Asay is general manager of the Americas and vice president of business development at Alfresco, and has nearly a decade of operational experience with commercial open source and regularly speaks and publishes on open-source business strategy. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET.

Francisco Antonio Cerón García

The main question: What would be your next strategy step to continue developing Internet in a new radical way?
It is a way in the sense of “meta”, like Google is a “meta internet”. Do we know how to do it?
A silicon valley is essentially 90% about the people and 10% about the place. Places close to financial centres and developed cities are more likely to host the next silicon valley, but smart people can turn any place into a silicon valley if that’s what they want, even if it’s in the middle of nowhere. However, now with the Internet I believe less in silicon valleys. I mean, what’s the point of having silicon valleys when entrepreneurs and techies can network through the Net and telecommute? As everyday real life contact becomes less necessary to conduct business, we will soon start seeing the genesis of ‘virtual’ silicon valleys leveraging the power of the Internet. If Ihad to build the next silicon valley, I would start by recruiting smart people on the Internet and creating incentives for like-minded individuals and companies to participate in some sort of hub website virtual marketplace

It makes me think carefully about the next big revolutionary step on internet development. Eventually, I think that the issue that is being treated here is a key issue and it deserves a new blog to be opened for it.
Generally speaking, this is the great step that could completely change our world as far as we know it now, like when computers were created and developed or just like Google, and it is all this tiny but huge things that have been changing our way of living and the way we understand life.
This is an open question, and I want that it would be the spirit of this simple blog!
You are all invited to build the meta internet!
Then you could start thinking a lot about this issue!

Meta

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